Devendra Banhart says his music is inspired by goats, shoes, stickers and even toupees. Jim Carroll wigs out with the underground folk maestro.
We haven't heard anything like this in years. Over the past 18 months or so a whole host of freaky folkies, spinning the kind of psychedelic fairytales last spotted in heavy rotation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, have found their way into the limelight. By coincidence or design, the time is right for such loosely aligned artists as Joanna Newsom, Vetiver, Coco Rosie, Iron & Wine, Espers, Six Organs of Admittance and many others to shine.
If these twisted folkies have a standard-bearer, it's Devendra Banhart. His albums to date have been magnificent creations, all wide-eyed wayward melodies and enchanting whimsy topped with a quivery voice you won't mistake for anything else.
Dev's background is certainly the stuff of boho legend. He was born in Texas and named by an Indian mystic who was a friend of his parents. After his parents divorced, mother and son high-tailed to Caracas in Venezuela before eventually moving on to Los Angeles.
Banhart was a talented artist and won a scholarship to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, but found academic life a bit of a drag. He left to become a wandering troubadour, playing pubs and restaurants and recording rough demos of his own songs whenever he got his hands on a four-track recorder. One of these demos found its way to the Young God Records and label boss Michael Gira was smitten. The rest is history and the reason Dev now finds himself something of a spokesman for the new folk underground.
And what a spokesman. Interviews with Banhart are fantastic things where flights of fancy, hippie meanderings and bizarre tangents are the norm. A simple question about what influences him when he sits down to write music provokes the kind of answer you'll never get from glum Irish singer-songwriters.
"Everything in the universe helps," says Banhart. "Everything. Vans, cars, lights, goats, toupees, trumpets, microphones and shoes and pillows and glass and stages and flowers and heels and chins and lips and boots and rings and bells and stickers and rafters and boats and fish and fences and basketball and R Kelly. Everything, you know?" That answer, you feel, would be completely different on another day.
"I've no idea how it happens, where the idea comes from in the first place", he says of his songwriting. "The only thing I'm sure about is that the weird little spark of inspiration that comes down from heaven is going to come down at the most inconvenient time possible, when there's no pen, paper, guitar or recording equipment."
Dev has his own way around this. "What I would do is call up a friend and say 'I'm going to sing a song, don't erase it'. I would sing the song and then I'd go to their house and record it from their cellphone or answering machine."
At the moment, Banhart's attention is focused on a somewhat different recording. He has just finished recording a new album in upstate New York with Pernice Brother, Thom Monahan. Unlike last year's Rejoicing In The Hands and Nino Rojo albums, which were veritable solo runs, this one features many different musicians, lots and lots of them by the sound of it.
"There's an amazing instrumental band from New York called Tarantula on it and there's Otto Hauser from the Espers, Noah from The Pleased, Kevin Barker and Honey and Adam Forkner from White Rainbow. There's a great fiddle player called Emma O'Donnell and Ted Webber from the Hunger Mountain Boys is on it. Lots more people too!" It sounds like quite a jam. "I think we did something which is quite us, you know. It's not that it's me, a little Thom and a little someone else. It feels too natural and was too fun to be anything else but us. I'm happy with it."
Banhart also seems quite content with the life he is living right now, after all, he gets to tour and record and see the world. To him, it's still all about sharing. "The reason I started playing was because Noah from The Pleased gave me his old four-track recorder and I started recording with the intention that I was going to give these recordings to my friends. So it just feels like an extension if I can share it with my friends. My dream wasn't that I could have thousands people hear what I do."
He's now signed to XL Records, home of such acts as the White Stripes, Basement Jaxx and MIA, where they obviously feel he can appeal to the masses. "It's good because they have these huge artists so I don't feel any pressure. I'm a little bug on the label and that is cool. They don't make me feel like I should be the next whatever, they let me do my own thing. I am glad the pressure is on White Stripes. I definitely don't want to be that band at all."
Yet Banhart admits it is unnerving to suddenly give so much control of his life to a record label or tour schedule. "It's been a strange one and I did start feeling that I was not in control of my own life. Years ago, I used to like to walk around until I got lost and then I would try to find out where the fuck I was, you know, just wander.
"But I can't do that now as I have to do shows and I've been on tour for years, so I have lost that ability. Now the joy in my life is every time that I get to play."
Devendra Banhart plays Cruiscin Lan, Cork on July 26th; Róisín Dubh, Galway (July 27); The Village, Dublin (July 29th) and Empire Music Hall, Belfast (July 30th)
